As the pharmaceutical industry churns out more cancer treatments, a new analysis finds that oncologists who receive payments over an extended period of time — mostly for speaking or consulting — are much more likely to prescribe a medicine made by the company that writes them a check.
The physicians treating kidney and lung cancer as well as chronic myeloid leukemia typically wrote more prescriptions for drugs made by a company that paid them over a three-year period, according to the findings, which were published in The Oncologist. However, a cause-and-effect relationship was not established and the same sort of association was not found among doctors who treated prostate cancer.
Specifically, there was an 81 percent increase in prescribing among doctors treating kidney cancer and who received payment for consulting or speaking. Among those who treated lung cancer, prescribing increased 69 percent, while prescribing rose 22 percent for chronic myeloid leukemia. The findings, which were statistically significant, suggest this sort of work cements relationships with drug makers, one study author noted.
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